Considerable problems arise in performing decisions involving more than one participant. Among the problems that exist are the availability (or lack thereof) of information, the reliability of that information, and the relevance of that information to the needs of the decision makers. If the information fails in one or more respects it is highly likely that a suboptimal decision will be made.
All decisions essentially rely on the ability of participants to predict the outcomes of the decision from the inputs of the information which led to the decision. While the abilities of various participants is not something that can likely be addressed through technology the availability, reliability, and relevance of information which facilitates those decisions can be addressed through the use of technology.
There are several features of information systems which lead to information being unavailable, unreliable, and irrelevant. These features prevent predictions (and thus successful decisions) from being able to be made effectively by decision makers. In general these undesirable results arise from one or more of the following categories of constraints: (i) unavailable information, (ii) unreliable information and (iii) irrelevant information. These three categories of constraints can be effectively described as information limits.
In contexts where information is limited, decision makers often have to accept one of three bad options: (i) a high number of errors resulting from unavailable information (type I errors) or (ii) a high number of errors resulting from unreliable errors (type II errors); or (iii) the decisions made are significantly suboptimal by virtue of information and coordination failure between decision participants. Type I errors limit the downside of a potential decision but at the expense of a heavily restricted pool of decision candidates—which decreases the probability that a really good decision can be made. Type II errors result in potential decisions are not restricted to a narrow pool; however that liberality comes at the cost of a higher probability that a truly bad decision has unknowingly been made. In each case, the decision maker's interests are not best served as the result of the limited information. The last option exists because decision makers aren't able to identify the variant arrangements which could maximize the value of a decision. Consequently the results of the decision process are suboptimal to what they could have been.
There are several contributing factors for why information might be limited in the context of a mutual decision needing to be made. First, the more information a party or shares with the market regarding their specific interest, the greater the number of impostor counterparties appear masquerading as counterparty candidates which can meet that interest. Thus a party is reluctant to share a wide scope of information. Second, the more information a market participant shares with the market, the greater the information which is available for competing participants to use against them, further incenting participants to not share information. Lastly, the more information a participant shares with counterparty participants the greater leverage a counterparty participant has against the participant.
In addition, there are several problems which exist which make information sharing and processing uneconomical for participants. For example, decision counterparts don't know the scope of the domain of information which is critical for other participants to understand in order to make a decision so they consequently provide large amounts of irrelevant information which is very costly for participants to provide. Further, there isn't a common medium of gathering and communicating contextually similar information from decision participants who can provide that information to decision participants who need that information in order to effectively compare decision alternatives to make a good decision. Another problem is that information that is shared by counterparty participants is often too voluminous to be effectively processed. This information usually requires substantial additional time and energy to process, filter, sort, and relate in order to make it useful for a decision. Further, information provided by market participants often contains several inaccuracies which make it unreliable. In order for participants to make the information reliable, significant time and energy must be spent verifying and cross-checking information for inaccuracies so that the information a participant uses is reliable enough to use for a decision.
A brief sampling of examples of situations where bilateral and multilateral decisions occur is as follows: (i) employment decisions between potential employers and potential employees, (ii) servicing and contracting decisions between service providers and contractors, (iii) real estate purchase or lease decisions made between owner/lessors and possibly an owner/lessor's agent, and buyer/lessees and a buyer/lessee's agent, (iv) industrial equipment decisions made between equipment providers and equipment users, (v) financial investment decisions made between financial services agents and investors, and (vii) supply chain decisions made between designers, suppliers, integrators, logistics providers, and customers.
In each of these decisions all counterparties and parties involved in the decision are engaged as stakeholders. Also involved are those that each party or counterparty has designated to help them either (i) perform an evaluation or (ii) provide information associated with the decision. In connection with each of these decisions, each party seeks something that is typically only provided by another party. Consequently, the preferences which the parties have do not exist in a symmetrical fashion such that counterparty interests can reasonably align with one another or be compared with one another in meaningful way because even when interests do coincidentally align in one respect, the alignments of other preferences to attributes do not meaningfully align—meaning that in the aggregate there is no meaningful alignment of interests.
Beyond these practical challenges, there are also significant technical challenges which exist in the prior art which have not been previously addressed. First among these is the significant number of computer cycles which are necessary for decision support systems to perform various functions. These functions include, but are not limited to: (1) survey generation, (2) survey scoring, (3) survey reporting, (4) survey administration, (5) data entry, (6) record creation, (7) data querying, (8) data evaluation, (9) scoring, (10) ranking, (11) sorting, (12) messaging, and (13) event triggering. Systems that require more computer cycles to perform these functions require greater resources—including a larger number of computer processing elements, more electrical power consumption, and more space on electronic storage mediums in order to process such information.
Secondly, these systems require significant storage medium capacities in order to process information. This is particularly acute with regard to multilateral decision support systems. The prior art decision support systems aggregate tremendous numbers of records and use significant storage resources, where information is stored to a storage medium. Within the domain of storage of data for decision support systems these systems also collect information which is often of low-value compared to storage and maintenance costs of that information. This is primarily the result of either the redundant collection of information or the failure of system design to select only information which primarily has high-value to be collected.
Thirdly, another failing of conventional decision support systems in this area is that they may have very long temporal slack-periods between critical data inputs and the delivery of a final result which can be utilized in decision making. Fourth, many decision support systems are severely limited in their ability to identify optimal arrangements of Party-to-Counterparty arrangements due to the fact that their processes either, (1) involve scoring based only on preferences without consideration of attributes, (2) base their scoring only on the presence or absence of attributes without relation to the preferences of decision participants, (3) utilize unilateral evaluation where the preferences or attributes of either Parties or Counterparties are utilized as a decision criterion, and/or (4) suffer from a design that does not provide sufficient flexibility to address either: (a) the rapid changes in the needs of decision participants, (b) the most relevant needs of decision participants, and/or (c) all of the various different types of information which are needed by different types of decision participants for a given type of decision.